Tag Archives: Kate Hammer

How to save luxury brands (and American capitalism)

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amElizabeth Segran has a nice essay in Fast Company: The Decline Of Premium American Fashion Brands. What Happened, Ralph And Tommy?

As a teen, Segran admired ads by Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. That’s over.

Today, at 33, none of these brands interest me. They conjure up images of outlet malls.

The problem is widespread

I’m not the only one who feels that these iconic American brands have lost their luster. Many are on a downward spiral, hit by sluggish sales. Ralph Lauren is facing plunging profits resulting in the shuttering of retail stores. Coach is in a similar boat, having lost significant market share. Michael Kors recently devised a strategy of cutting back on discounts, since markdowns appear to have killed the company’s cachet. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which are owned by the same parent company, have seen decreasing sales in the U.S. market.

Luxury brands are, in short, a mess.

Segran consults several experts and they roll out the probable causes:

Luxury brands:

■ were pushed by Wall Street to grow
■ growth forced offshore manufacture and this created diminished quality
■ searching for larger markets lead to production overruns
■ overruns forced brands into the bargain and outlet channels.
■ finding Ralph Lauren in a discount bin at T.J. Maxx made it seem a little less luxurious

Other factors

■ new brands rose with a new, more social, sensibility, Everlane or Warby Parker

But something is missing here from this account. We are looking at a fundamental change in sensibility.

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amConsider the Ralph Lauren ad that Fast Company used to illustrate this essay.

Almost everything is now wrong with this image. But not one of these errors in the image is remarked upon.

Errors in the image: 

That this picture has a center to it.
(Younger consumers are social animals. They are networked creatures. They are distributed souls. Practically, for content creators, that means dump the “focus” and go for “foci.” See recent work by Fitbit and Android for the social “foci” view, and my thoughts here.)

That the center of the picture is a white male, apparently WASP and privileged.
(Do I really need to explain the rise of diversity and what it means to the models we want to see in our ads?)

That the male in question has a woman wrapped around his arm.
(This too should be unnecessary, but everyone is now a feminist. And this posture is absurdly subordinate and subordinating.)

That this woman has the strangest look on her face.
(It’s an expressive that appears to say, “This is all I want from life, to be by my man.” I mean, really.)

That there is a steely eyed friend.
(what is this guy dressed for? A trip to his place in the country, the ancestral home, all brick, beam and ‘old money made material’?)

That the surrounding group glows with youth, ethnic specificity, and privilege
(the first motive for luxury consumption used to be upward aspiration. A consumer culture fanned the hope that we too could rise in the world, into exalted social realms, away from the ordinary, “common,” “coarse,” “little” people. But this idea is now openly ridiculed.)

Attention, sellers! The single most important idea driving your market place is dying. This idea of status is dying. It is now a recipe for ridicule.

So let’s be clear. Yes, there are plenty of “internal” reasons why luxury brands are struggling. And thank you, Elizabeth, for discovering them. But there are external, cultural ones, as well.

These cultural changes are not recent. These have been in the works for several decades. And it is a perfect storm as we rethink our ideas of privilege, status admiration, upward aspiration, sexism, and the adoration of the wealth and privilege.

imagesWhat to do? How could luxury brands have prepared themselves for this cultural disruption? At the risk of repeating myself, the single simplest strategy is to hire a Chief Culture Officer. For instructions, read this book ➼.

There’s a ton of talent out there. A few names come to mind. Tom LaForge, Barbara Lippert, Steffon Davis, Ana Domb, Philip McKenzie, Sam Ford, Joyce King Thomas, Michael Brooks, Jamie Gordon, Monica Ruffo, Rochelle Grayson, Kate Hammer, Drew Smith, Rob Fields, Parmesh Shashani, Shara Karasic, Ujwal Arkalgud, Tracey Follows, Eric Nehrlich, Bud Caddell, Barb Stark, Mark Boles, Mark Miller, Helen Walters.

(For a longer list, see this Pinterest page filled with candidates.}

If only Ralph Lauren had had anyone noted above as their Chief Culture Officer. How much share holder value would have been protected? How many careers saved? How much more fun would it have been to work at Ralph Lauren?

American capitalism has become a bit of a punching bag. There are so many cultural disruptions in play. A crisis now haunts CPG and Hollywood. So that’s three of the great workhorses of the American economy. And it’s at this point when we can see a crisis running right through our economy, touching things as diverse as luxury brands, CPG brands and Hollywood pictures, that’s it is time to rethink what we’re doing.

Take a smart person with good credentials, give them resources and give them power. It’s time to make our marketing, design thinking, branding, and innovation intelligence responsive to the simple truth that’s visible to most cultural creatives and virtually every Millennial. It’s time to make the organization as responsive to culture as it is to everything else in the near environment. All other options are stupid and embarrassing.

 

The Automated Anthropologist (details here)

Today, Tuesday, July 16th, I will be in SF doing what every people tell me to do.  It’s an experiment, a culturematic.  

Starting at 9:00 West coast time, I will be in Union Square ready to act on your directives.

Please send those directives to @grant27 on Twitter, with #autoanthro as your hashtag.

In between acting on real-time directives, I will try to act on the suggestions you have sent over the last couple of days. Thank you for those!

You can follow the events of the day by searching for #autoanthro on Twitter. (I like Tweetdeck as a way of keeping track of my Twitter searches.)

We will take photos and video and post the former on Twitter and the latter on YouTube. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kate Hammer.)

We will post our location in SF using Glimpse with links announced by Twitter.

For those who miss events tomorrow, I will post a compilation on Storify in a week or so.

USA Today has given us early coverage (for which many thanks, Bruce Horovitz!).  You can find the details here.  

Thanks to the help of Cameron Maddox of the Academy of Art University’s School of Advertising I will have the assistance of a recent graduate, Maria Elmqvist. Thanks, Cameron and Maria!

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Best,

Grant

For background, here’s the email that first announced the project a couple of days ago.  

Over the course of Tuesday, July 16, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and morality(ish).

I am going to San Francisco this week.

I am giving a talk on Monday and come back to NYC on Wednesday.

That leaves the whole of Tuesday to …

Well, that’s the question, what do I do on Tuesday? (I should have booked a get-together, but things got busy and I never got around to it. Apologies to friends in SF, Eric and Ed especially.)

So this is my plan.

To put myself on automatic pilot.

Over the course of Tuesday, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and mortality(ish).

Please tweet your instructions to @grant27 on Tuesday over the course of the day.

I will tweet the results, text and photos, with the hashtag #autoanthro.

I haven’t quite figured out how best to capture and sequence the requests you send me. And I can’t promise to do everything that is proposed. But I’ll try. I will.

Feel free to embarrass me. I believe myself to be one ill-chosen word away from social catastrophe in any case.

But the real object is ingenuity. What effects can you set in train in an American city by directing an anthropologist on automatic pilot. Think of it as a rolling Rube Goldberg event. Small events and larger narrative arcs are both welcome. (Everything from “Turn right.” to “Find someone to tell you the story of [x].”)

If the Twitter feed stops suddenly or you never hear from me again, well, we’ll call it a long term culturematic.

Thanks for reading and thanks for any directions you send me on Tuesday! Grant